210 THE STORY OF MY LIFE [1848
private tutor, that I should never of myself have ventured to try to persuade her to look out for a second.
My earlier letters to my mother from Lyncombe are filled with nothing but descriptions of the scenery round Bath, of which I formed a most exaggerated estimate, as I had seen so little with which I could compare it. Once a week at least I used to go into Bath itself, to dine with my father's old friend Walter Savage Landor, who had been driven away from his Florentine home by his wife's violent temper. Mr. Landor's rooms (in Catherine Place, and afterwards at 2 Eivers Street) were entirely covered with pictures, the frames fitting close to one another, leaving not the smallest space of wall visible. One or two of these pictures were real works of art, but as a rule he had boiight them at Bath, quite willing to imagine that the little shops of the Bath dealers could be storehouses of Titians, Giorgiones, and Yandycks. The Bath picture-dealers never had such a time; for some years almost all their wares made their way to Mr. Landor's walls. Mr. Landor lived alone with his beautiful white Spitz dog Pomero, which he allowed to do whatever it liked, and frequently to sit in the oddest way on the bald top of his head. He would talk to Pomero by the hour together, poetry, philosophy, whatever lie was thinking of, all of it imbued with his own powerful personality, and would often roar with laughter till the whole house seemed to shake. I have never heard a laugh like that of Mr. Landor — "deep-mouthed Beotian Savage Landor," as Byronnding my first